Wilfed Githuka

Self Driving Cars|Electronics|Linux|Mandarin

Welcome to my lab

If it’s not hard, its not worth making

I am currently collecting drivers’ data about driving habits for my Udacity Self Driving Car Nanodegree program. You can check out some of my progress below. If am not in my lab, drop me an email and we can talk.

The IBM Selectric typewriter a machine that was as a result of “Seven years of research” was one of the best machines ever sold back in 1961. The Selectric was so popular that it captured 75% of the american market. It was only replaced by the electronic one which IBM later made.
The great sound of this machine can be relived in spacemacs through a cool layer that was developed by Sylvain Benner.
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Ever since I went deep into Linux in 2015, I have heard of emacs being mentioned as the holy grail of Linux text editing. I must admit but it looked messy and had to grasp.
Early this year I came accross Spacemacs and it looked interesting but just like emacs I gave it a glance and planned to give it more time.
A month ago I saw my pal Raymond navigate his Linux box effortlessly using a similar software appearance quicly editing and opening files in what seemed like a spectactular fun.
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Today is one of the best days of my life. When I saw the email from Udacity that I have bee accepted for the Udacity Self Driving Car Nanodegree Program, I was elated. This is an online program that teaches one how to develop the necessary software and skills that a self driving system uses.
I learnt about the Nanodgree back in Dec of 2016 when I was starting to learn Python and this was the goal of that project.
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After fiddling around and some long hours setting up my server, I managed to install Wordpress on Caddy.For those who have not used Caddy before, you can read more about it on Caddyserver.
Its awesome since it gives you a https (security) for your domain. Caddy is praised by industry experts for security defaults and unpararelleld usability.
Take Note To make this tutorial easier to follow, I will first point out my biggest issues which you need to take care as you go forth:
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The sound of drifing wind and background noise of students discussing in low tones is the relative ambience that I observed for the short duration that I was in Nyeri Baptist School. I cannot forget to mention the fact that apart from the normal mobile network, the air seemed electrically clean. No numerous untamed, unmanaged wifi signals roaming in the air that we soak in daily in Nairobi. It was just the best condusive environment for knowledge.
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I go to BSF on Monday evenings to Westlands St Marks Church and the drive there with my friends provides a good chance to collect some data for my self driving car programme. My data collection device is still my mobile phone mounted on the dashboard. I have explained how to do this in my previous post.
Yesterday’s run was like normal but over the last 3 weeks, my videos have been appearing with some darkness which is as a result from the mounting angle facing the road.
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Ever since I dipped my mind into the autonomous vehicles world, I have been noting carefully road transport in a whole new dimension. I now see data and need lots of it. Training a CNN needs alot of data and even when I was working on the Lane Detection Algo project, I used data that was provided by (Udacity)[udacity.com]. But now I deceided to put the same algo on local roads here in Kenya.
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This past week has had quite some significant developments in the autonomous car industry. The big companies are still leading the pack though some have decided to cut back in developments. Seizing this opportunity, small startups are rising by launching market ready self driving cars promising to make them ready by 2020.
Top Headlines Lyft and Drive.ai will be offering free rides in Self Driving cars in the Bay Area with Safety Drivers - David Silver Whats Driving The Connected Car?
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I stepped into my first Chinese class in May 2012 at Kenyatta University Confucius Institute and I have been using Chinese professionally as from September 2014 when I landed my first translation job at the Standard Gauge Railway. Speakig Chinese is natural for me but not the idioms which are a headache. Speaking like a Chinese native requires alot of time and preactise, something that many non natives dont have time.
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Of late I have been busy making the car since my last update. If you do not undertsand what this project is aout, please check the last update and check out my medium page where I give regular updates. Its so easy to blog on medium.
In summary the following have happened since April
Learned alot about Self Driving Cars from Udacity Bricked a Raspberry Pi Model 3 Bought and destroyed an RC Car Coded alot in Python Eploded a LiPo battery One of my main challenges with the RC Self Driving car was power.
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